Page 189 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

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Soundscape

Dorothea E. Schulz

Sound sensation and religious mediation
Muslim soundscapes
Soundscape: origins and uses of the term
Soundscape and/as religious mediation
Soundscape and religious mediation:
authenticating authority and religious experience
in Muslim West Africa

Sound sensation and religious mediation

Most scholarship on sound sensation and religious practice has focused
on the role of music, however diversely defined, in mediating spiritual
experience. Left out from these scholarly accounts of religious music are
other forms and “genres” of sound that feed into the complex topography
of sensually mediated religious experience, a topography that forms the
backdrop against which spiritual leadership and community are performed
and validated. Still, an important insight of conventional scholarly accounts
of sacred music is that religious traditions differ substantially in how they
conceptualize “sacred sound,” that is, sound that mediates divine presence.
Only in some traditions does music constitute a legitimate modality of
sacred mediation. Other religious traditions sanction only a few, selected
aural and oral modes of religious mediation and oppose them to music, its
mundane character, and sites of performance.
In Hindu religious traditions, for instance, esoteric notions of sacred sound
form a cornerstone of devotional practice and of disciplinary techniques
aiming at higher spiritual awareness. Music is believed to have divine origins
and is explicitly acknowledged as being instrumental to generating and
validating genuine spiritual experience. Accordingly, institutions of sacred
music production and performance are deeply engrained in the social-
organizational setup of Hindu religious practice. In sacred sound, orality is
intertwined with melodic-rhythmic sonic forms. That is, ritual hymns and
incantations depend on their power as intoned speech to gain effectiveness